User blog:Minifigur/Image Dilema
Here it goes: my first blog post. It is about something that bothers me for quite some time and occurs in many different form: the obsession about pictures. First of all, I love pictures. They illustrate, they explain, they help and especially for a wiki about products and characters they are simply essential. But some users simply exaggerate. Croppings I don’t know why it is, that people love to crop images. To be honest, I did it too. For LEGO Marvel Super Heroes I thought the list of characters would benefit from stand-alone images of each character. It became clear that such a task could never be completed, since there aren’t high-res promotional images of all characters. But for the purpose of this list, it is still useful to crop them. I understand that. I do not understand why a cropped images are better than the full one in a random page gallery, though. For example, why is one minifigures face cropped from a poster more useful than the poster itself? There is definitely no quality improvement. I just can’t get my head around that. So please enlighten me. The advantage would also be, that the same images could be used for multiple pages, but maybe that’s exactly the motivation some user have: improving their stats, by uploading ten images instead of one. Main Images Is there a rule that the latest image/version of a minifigure needs to be the main image of that minifigures site? Doc Ock has several minifigure variants with perfectly fine images available in the variants gallery. Yet, the image in the info box is the crappy one from the most recent ad spread of the new Marvel sets. There are plenty of other examples for such strange behaviour. Watermarks Watermarks can be annoying. Especially in cases like the current product images, grabbed from bol.com, where there is no other interest in them than promoting a particular site by placing the logo on an official images. By removing those watermarks you simply recreate the original image given to them by TLC in the first place. However, the original purpose of watermarks is to protect images that have a particular ownership. Most recent example: WhiteFang's photos of The LEGO Movie Series. Someone just decided to put them on this wiki, but not before removing all of WhiteFangs name tags (and sometimes badly). It would have been less effort to send him a message and ask. I did. He’s fine with his images being used on Brickipedia, but only as long as they stay in their original form (which can all be seen on WhiteFang's flickr).You also have to consider the responsibility that comes with uploading images. Brickipedia has become a somewhat popular source for LEGO related information. So of course the tempered version of WhiteFang's shots also appeared on other Facebook pages quite quickly. Unfortunately proper sourcing of information does not really seem like a trend in the internet. Well this has become a lot more lengthy than I thought. I hope you don’t think I am one of those nagging users, that act like Brickipedia is about to die and everything is going down the drain. I actually have it’s improvement in mind and think these might be some aspects to start from. Any feedback is welcome. Cheers, and happy building PS: while I was writing this I saw Missingno.10 already tackled one of the things I mentioned: *http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Abraham_Lincoln *http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/Thread:333171 Category:Blog posts